DIARY
Channel 4 showed a remarkable documentary two weeks ago about a musi- cian called Clive who had completely lost his memory. Amnesia is usually portrayed in fiction as a matter of people waking up in hospital beds and wondering, 'Who am I?' before going on to reconstruct their pasts. Clive wasn't like that. He had a mind like a gramophone stylus, perfectly sensi- tive to the groove of the present but quite unable to move backwards across the record and reach the music of a minute ago. The memory of even the most im- mediate past, eating that morning's break- fast, kissing his wife, was as opaque as black vinyl. Every minute was a rebirth. His wife would leave him for a few moments and on her return Clive would break down and cry with relief, having imagined she was dead. It was terrifying as well as moving, because it seemed that nothing could be done; he couldn't under- stand his condition because he couldn't remember it, and medical science, so Dr Jonathan Miller explained, did not really understand how the brain worked. Last night, however, I met someone whose experience suggested a small chink of hope. Kim Sabido, a reporter for ITN, lives around the corner and over the past two years has gradually fought his way out of the present tense. In 1983 he crashed his motorbike in Greece, broke his skull and lay in a coma. The common wisdom of the time, even when he recovered conscious- ness, was that he might be better off dead. For months he could remember nothing. He devised stratagems which enabled him to cope with late-20th-century England. He addressed all male friends as 'Brian' and all female friends as 'Sue'. Once he and his girlfriend went off to stay in a house in Wales owned by Julie Christie, the actress. On their way home, his girl- friend tested him: 'Who was that woman we stayed with?' An actress of some kind?' offered Sabido, hopefully. 'Yes but which one?' Sabido pondered the question and at last reached a conclusion. `Thora Hird.' Today he still cannot remember anything that happened to him in his twenties, but he has recovered enough of a working memory to be able to resume his job as a television journalist. The achieve- ment is chronicled in a new book (Kim's Story, Harrap £8.95) written by his girl- friend, Scarlet MccGwire; a good name to have if you partner still tends to forget things.
Bank holiday Monday was a terrible day. Rain, a trip to the Oval cancelled, Botham's innings cut off in mid-flow, and a wife sunk in deep depression because she has just finished a novel by Anita Brook- IAN JACK ner. I asked her what happened to the leading character. 'Oh, she goes on being 40, unattached and writing articles about Balzac.' Help ma Boab! The only cheerful event was a visit by Duncan Campbell (the City Limits journalist and not the secrets specialist of the same name on the New Statesman). He revealed that Lofty, the dopey but pleasant youth who is about to marry a single-mother in EastEnders, is in real life an anarcho-syndicalist; and the equally reassuring information that Alistair Burnett, the newsreader, figures high in a poll of City Limits readers as one of the people they would least like to spend a day on Clapham Common with. The winner of the same poll's most boring conversation category is likely to be: I saw Maradona's hand touch the ball, no question.
In last week's Spectator, Hugh Joseph began his review of The Railway Station: a social history with the words:
Trains either excite people or induce a feeling of gloom. Railway enthusiasts, which are what train-spotters grow up to be, summon up a picture of bicycle clips, nut cutlets and plenty of freckles.
He is right, in the case of my childhood, about the bicycle clips and the freckles, but I don't know about the rest. The nut cutlets have surely strayed from a different pic- ture, the one that Orwell painted of pre- war English socialists as bearded sandal- wearers and carrot-juice drinkers. Nor am I so sure about train-spotters' always grow- ing up into railway enthusiasts, or about the strict division of people into the excited and the gloomy. Confronted by a train, I can feel both; the last because I sometimes think that an enthusiasm for railways has blotted out great patches of my adoles- cence, just as surely as Kim Sabido's knock on the head did for his twenties. I think I resent it, this loco-amnesia. Twenty-five years ago this month, for example, I travelled alone as a 16-year-old schoolboy from Edinburgh to London and then roamed around the city for a week, only occasionally supervised by my elder brother. I ate my first meal in a Chinese restaurant, saw Osborne's Luther and Waterhouse's Billy Liar in the theatre, and returned every night to a bedsit with lino on the floor in Kilburn. It was all tremendously exciting and is now all tremendously blurred. The journey, on the other hand, stands out in vivid detail. travelled by a needlessly complicated route, of course; a Birmingham train from Prince's Street station (now a car park) and a Euston express from Crewe. I remember more about the locomotives than I do about Luther; a Stanier Jubilee (Trinidad and Tobago?) at Prince's Street, an LMS Pacific (City of Salford?) drawing us out of Crewe.. I thought of this young passion again on Friday night when, over a late supper in the Groucho Club, the editor of a distinguished Sunday newspaper suddenly confessed to the table that he had known his first moments of sexual pleasure aged 13, in Coventry Cathedral. 'I was walking down the aisle in some kind of school procession when this girl put her hand in mine. I can still remember the thrill.' What anecdote from the age of 13 could I offer the table in return? The memory of a Gresley A4 (Empire of India) storming on to the Forth Bridge with a fish special for Billingsgate? No, even Proust would have a hard job with such material.
Journalism is a trade with very uneven rewards. Last week I received a sheaf of payment slips from the Times which should have been sent instead to a freelance journalist in one of our ancient university towns; the addressing machine had made a mistake. The slips revealed that over three weeks in the summer the Times had paid £2,432.20 for news items delivered and published. I wondered if I had missed a great story from Oxbridge — gilded youth in new heroin scandal, professor authenti- cates Stalin's cookery notes — and looked under the column headed 'description'. Every entry said 'examination results'. This seems to me an ideal way to make money. For a few mornings each summer you cycle to the university offices and collect a list of names. Then to a photo- copying machine to make copies for the Guardian and the Telegraph as well as the Times. Last to the station and send them off Red Star to Paddington or Liverpool Street. You have no worries about where the next sentence is coming from — or if there will be a next sentence — and you collect from one newspaper alone a sum equivalent to 60 book reviews for the TLS or 24 diaries for the Spectator; all this and the knowledge that you have given an acute pleasure to thousands of people graduates and their relations — which no ordinary piece of journalism, no matter how well written, can ever deliver.
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